Gerd Leonhard’s thoughts, finds and other comments on the future of ethics in a digital world

“This problem has a name: the paradox of automation. It applies in a wide variety of contexts, from the operators of nuclear power stations to the crew of cruise ships, from the simple fact that we can no longer remember phone numbers because we have them all stored in our mobile phones, to the way we now struggle with mental arithmetic because we are surrounded by electronic calculators. The better the automatic systems, the more out-of-practice human operators will be, and the more extreme the situations they will have to face.”

As I said, the point of capitalism is to destroy jobs, not create them.

The second big change is post-industrialisation. Wealth is being created – not by making and selling physical things – but in areas of knowledge, information and financialisation.

These areas simply do not need as many workers as traditional employers. Where Kodak used to employ 140,000 people and was valued at $28bn (and is now bankrupt thanks to digitisation), Instagram was sold to Facebook in 2012 for a billion dollars when it (Instagram) employed 12 people.

Facebook itself is the sixth-largest company in the US, but it employs a mere 12,000 people full time. Compare that to, say, General Motors, which during the 1980s employed 349,000 workers in the US alone.

Google, one of the richest corporations on the planet, only employs about 55,000 people worldwide.

“If you’re an iPhone user, you’ve come across Apple’s AI, and not just in Siri’s improved acumen in figuring out what you ask of her. You see it when the phone identifies a caller who isn’t in your contact list (but did email you recently). Or when you swipe on your screen to get a short list of the apps that you are most likely to open next. Or when you get a reminder of an appointment that you never got around to putting into your calendar. Or when a map location pops up for the hotel you’ve reserved, before you type it in. Or when the phone points you to where you parked your car, even though you never asked it to. These are all techniques either made possible or greatly enhanced by Apple’s adoption of deep learning and neural nets.

“Bostrom aggregates the results of four different surveys of groups such as participants in a conference called “Philosophy and Theory of AI,” held in 2011 in Thessaloniki, Greece, and members of the Greek Association for Artificial Intelligence (he does not provide response rates or the phrasing of questions, and he does not account for the reliance on data collected in Greece).

His findings are presented as probabilities that human-level AI will be attained by a certain time:

“There are no good estimates on the global scale of the gig economy but in the US there are about 800,000 people earning money this way — via online intermediaries such as TaskRabbit, Lyft, Uber and Deliveroo — without being anyone’s employee. The term “algorithmic management” was coined last year by academics at the Carnegie Mellon University Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and it is this innovation, they argue, that makes the gig economy possible. For companies like Uber, which aspires to “make transportation as reliable as running water”, algorithmic management solves a problem: how to instruct, track and evaluate a crowd of casual workers you do not employ, so they deliver a responsive, seamless, standardised service.”

“Now the British Standards Institute has issued a more official version aimed at helping designers create ethically sound robots.

The document, BS8611 Robots and robotic devices, is written in the dry language of a health and safety manual, but the undesirable scenarios it highlights could be taken directly from fiction. Robot deception, robot addiction and the possibility of self-learning systems exceeding their remits are all noted as hazards that manufacturers should consider.

Welcoming the guidelines at the Social Robotics and AI conference in Oxford, Alan Winfield, a professor of robotics at the University of the West of England, said they represented “the first step towards embedding ethical values into robotics and AI”.”

“How will we know when the A.I. revolution has taken hold? A technology truly matures when it disappears. We don’t marvel at houses with electricity now, or the idea of driving to work at 60 miles an hour. We can say “phone” and mean a hand-held computer with NASA-level processing power and a professional-quality camera for taking selfies with our drones.”

“Now is the time to consider the design, ethical, and policy challenges that AI technologies raise,” said Grosz. “If we tackle these issues now and take them seriously, we will have systems that are better designed in the future and more appropriate policies to guide their use.””

“By 2021 a disruptive tidal wave will begin. Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service and consumer services,” said Forrester’s Brian Hopkins in the report.

The Inevitable Robot Uprising has already started, with at least 45% of US online adults saying they use at least one of the aforementioned digital concierges. Intelligent agents can access calendars, email accounts, browsing history, playlists, purchases and media viewing history to create a detailed view of any given individual. With this knowledge, virtual agents can provide highly customized assistance, which is valuable to shops or banks trying to deliver better customer service.”

Digital Ethics by Futurist Gerd Leonhard

Gerd Leonhard, Futurist and Humanist, Author, Keynote Speaker, CEO The Futures Agency, Zurich / Switzerland
Gerd Leonhard is a hunter and gatherer of human values from the future. From culture and society to commerce and technology, Gerd brings back the news from the future so business and society leaders can make better choices right now. In his latest book, Technology vs Humanity, Gerd explores the key ethical and social questions which urgently require an answer before we increasingly abdicate our very humanity. For organizations in the grip of disruption, Gerd supplies visionary insights and concentrated wisdom that informs key decisions makers today. A musician by origin, Gerd Leonhard has now redefined the vocation of futurist as a new humanist.
Gerd was listed as one of the top 100 influencers in technology by Wired magazine (2015).